Recent months have given voice to a number of Free to Play online games, seemingly allowing those of us with shallower pockets to enjoy online games without the compulsory costs or waiting for one of those 7 day trials to come around again. But why is F2P suddenly all the rage? And why should consumers care that publishers have found a new keyword to throw at us aside from such indefinable gems as AAA and epic?
Free to Play is not a particularly new term with games such as Runescape having used it successfully for the better part of a decade. The Free to play slogan has come to specifically refer to an online game which requires no transaction in order to play the game online. Unlike freeware, F2P games are almost exclusively online, and unlike demos or trials, F2P games typically provide a much larger slice of the entire game.
F2P and You(r wallet)
Within the F2P banner there is a wide variety of commercial models, so I’ll try cover all those I can discover.
The majority of F2P games incorporate micro-transactions which typically allow a player to purchase either content exclusive to transactions or content that can be hard/time consuming to otherwise obtain. Hats, hair, pet dragons, a Bitchin‘ Camero and flying brooms with a rainbow star exhaust are all at the hands of players who enjoy the game enough to invest optional dollars to add to their experience and enjoyment of the game.
Some F2P games actually restrict the free players to a portion of all available content, whilst Pay-to-Play players are treated to the full experience. Another large percentage of F2P games rely solely on advertising as their revenue source; giving you the entire game with only the occasional annoying popup about finding hot local girls looking for a casual encounter.
There are also a small number of games which offer Forever Free-to-Play (FF2P) where current free players will be allowed to continue to play even if the model should move to a P2P system at a later stage, something seen in transitions from Beta to full release as online Betas (Closed or Open) are often F2P in themselves. And finally, there exist games with congested free servers that offer less congested servers for the transaction, coined as Pay-to-Connect.
Why the Publisher’s eyes sparkle
Though certain online games are referred to as money making engines by almost exclusively holding to a P2P model (Hello World of Warcraft you dirty thing), publishers are learning the marketing benefit of releasing their online game for free. In a games market acknowledged as having consumers who rarely purchase and play more than 1 game of 1 genre at any one time, the online market is actually over-saturated.
For example, later this year people are already drawing their lines for battle for the war of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, and how many people think “Will I get both?”. Both of these games have an online component, but compared to something like the MMO market, the time investment required to experience all of the game’s content is small. Most gamers have invested time into an MMO during their lives, but how many played World of Warcraft + Aion at the same time? Publishers tried to lure players away from the existing MMO’s by directly competing with a genre of game which, thanks to it’s online support and updates, may have no definable expiry date.
Whilst western MMO’s struggled to compete with each other, Korean and Russian online games quietly thrived. Though rarely competing in revenue with P2P MMO’s, a large number of alternative online multiplayer games emerged in mid 2000s from Eastern publishers offering a F2P online game in English with these optional purchases and other monetary models where no player was forced to pay a dime to experience a large portion of the game. In a way, it took many publishers far too long to realise that competition in the online game market is actually heavily linked to a player’s pockets, or more correctly; a perception of how the player’s money is being spent.
The subscriptions weigh on the consumer as they often attempt to maximise the time period for which they have “purchased the right to play”. I was once informed in Year 10 commerce that a recurring customer is far more valuable than just the regular income they bring in as they recommend the products to others and are more likely to invest in more of your company than the one-off transaction of a new customer. It’s the retail industry’s bread and butter of keeping a customer happy in order to have them return; a customer service principle that game publishers are coming to grow in their understanding of.
The Average Player’s ‘Yays’ and ‘Nays’
With player’s pockets attacked in more creative ways, what should Bernard G. Gamer celebrate and what should he be concerned with? I’m not going to SWOT analyse this, let’s just list some basic pros and cons.
Pro:
- Did I mention the games are free? No more weighing the cost of your next meal against the purchase of a game you want
- A shift of MMO’s adopting a F2P model decreases likelihood of MMO’s shutting down completely.
- Thanks to the F2P model still generating revenue, F2P games are now more than just abandon-ware and are generally of a higher quality than Dink Smallwood.
Con:
- Power Items (those which give the player a benefit) that can only be purchased lead to the negative player belief of “Pay to Win”
- The quality of F2P games is still, on the average, of a lower standard than P2P games.
- Some of the F2P models do not appeal to certain audiences who may find something such as Pay to Connect or advertising detrimental to the average F2P player experience.
At the end of the day, each player should form their own opinion regarding their personal support for Free-to-Play games as there are both positive and negative connotations as publishers use us as commercial test Guinea Pigs to see what works in what environments. Generally, I’m of the opinion that a rise in F2P games means I have the opportunity to play more games that I never might have otherwise given the time of day (or more specifically: a cent from my account), and playing more games is never a bad thing.
The current state of F2P
As I mentioned previously, Free-to-Play is not a new movement, however it is something that has picked up some momentum in recent months: particularly in the MMO market. A sample of the recent push in F2P games which you may have heard in the news recently is as follows:
- 10th September 2010 – The Lord of the Rings Online moved to a F2P model on – revenues reportedly triple [Gamasutra]
- First Half 2011 – APB (All Points Bulletin), once thought to be canned, is relaunched under the F2P model [Euro Gamer]
- 4th April 2011 – Battlefield 2 remake “Battlefield Play4Free” is released in Open Beta [BattlefieldPlay4Free]
- 14th June 2011 – Valve adds a Free-to-Play section to their Steam Distribution Engine [Steam]
- 23rd June 2011 – Team Fortress goes F2P with The Uber Update [Team Fortress]
- 30th June 2011 – World of Warcraft makes itself F2P up to level 20 [Australian Gamer]
- 1st July 2011 – Once-upon-a-time contender to the World of Warcraft throne, Age of Conan moves into a F2P model. [Joystiq]
And this is only the more public slice of the Free to Play growth, with a veritable swarm of free games now existing. Games you’ve never heard of or would care about are now appealing to the logical part of your brain that weighs the investment into a game against your personal rating of the game. There’s certainly some rubbish in there to waste your time on, but sometimes you’ll walk past a rubbish bin that someone has scrapped Rogue Squadron 64 into and ponder stealing from someone else‘s rubbish bin.
Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back?
So all in all, Free-to-Play games are heavily on the rise, particularly in the MMO scene, but what does this mean for the future? Though I certainly doubt we’ll see games with an enormous investment release as F2P from day 1 (won’t stop me from praying The Old Republic is though), the other ranks of online games need not despair that they are unable to hit #1 on the player base chart and alternatives become more available to players. Publishers are trying new things on the players, and this can be a good thing further in the future as they build upon successes and failures, but may turn out poorly for the player bases their F2P commercial model fails with.
The future might see some of the most high quality games come to us at lower prices combined with some of the commercial components of F2P. Perhaps this trend may also transition into the consoles as the PC and mobile market move steadily into the F2P model as a standard. Of course, perhaps Activision realise their shareholders didn’t have a good last quarter and set a new standard that leaves us donating limbs for monthly repayments, but I live as an optimist that my pockets will be emptied by essentials. Like Bourbon.
